Learn about the background to this work in an interview with the Society of Early Americanists (as Scholar of the Month in November 2018)

Memory Lands revisits the pivotal Indigenous resistance movement and colonial crisis known as King Philip's War, which transformed the Native Northeast and colonial New England in the late seventeenth century (1675-1678). It retells the origins, nature, and consequences of this conflict, which has held lasting repercussions for tribal and Euro-American communities. As I demonstrate through a series of closely grounded case studies, the war and its legacies deeply affected communities' relationships with and understandings of place--particular lands and waters--and how they have envisioned their collective pasts as well as futures. Ranging from Deer Island in Boston Harbor, to Great Swamp near Narragansett Bay, to a waterfall on the Great (Connecticut) River, and all the way to the Bermuda Islands, the book invites readers on a gripping tour through the sometimes hidden stories of a region that remains contested ground in the twenty-first century.

The book draws upon over a dozen years of immersion in the landscapes, communities, and historical resources of the American Northeast. It reflects my research in more than 150 archives, museums, libraries, tribal collections, and other repositories of documents, publications, and objects. It also engages conversations with present-day descendant communities, whose memories and forms of knowledge are crucial conduits into the past and its reverberations.

ARTICLES & ESSAYS

“Materialities of Memory: Traces of Trauma and Resilience in the Native Northeast and Colonial New England.” Article forthcoming in English Language Notes, special issue on “Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration” (Fall 2019)

“Indigenous Stories in Stone: Mohegan Placemaking, Activism, and Colonial Encounters at the Royal Mohegan Burial Ground.” Article forthcoming in Native American and Indigenous Studies(Fall 2019)

Other publications

“Burl Bowls and Grinding Stones: Indigenous Materialities and Memorialization in the Native Northeast after King Philip’s War.” In Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present edited collection, based on Newberry Library symposium (forthcoming)

“Indigenous Traces and Resistances in Colonial Archives: Some Reflections from the Native Northeast.” In Afterlives of Indigenous Archives, eds. Gordon Henry and Ivy Schweitzer (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, forthcoming Sept. 2019)

“History of the Schooner Ernestina.” Report for Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER) Maritime Division, HAER No. MA-168 (2010). Filed in Built in America section of Library of Congress American Memory collection.

In progress:

“Collecting as Caretaking, Violence, and Entanglement in the Native/Colonial Northeast: Historical Roots and Contemporary Challenges”

Book reviews

“Powerful Currents and Submerged Shoals: Navigating Indigenous Maritime Histories.” Book review of Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2016), for Reviews in American History 46:4(Dec. 2018): 545-552

Book review of Susan Juster, Sacred Violence in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), for American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41:1 (2017)

Book review of Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016), for Journal of Social History (2018)

Book review of Ann Marie Plane, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), for History: Reviews of New Books Vol. 44, Iss. 4 (2016): 100-101

Book review of Robert E. Cray, Lovewell’s Fight: War, Death, and Memory in Borderland New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), for Historical New Hampshire (2016): 58-59

Book review of Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Harvard, 2014), for The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Winter 2015)

Book review of Heather Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York University, 2014), for The History Teacher, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Aug. 2015): 780-782

“Speaking Together: The Brothertown Indian Community and New Directions in Engaged Scholarship.” Review essay of David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Cornell, 2010), Craig N. Cipolla, Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World (U. of Arizona, 2013), and recent work on engaged/decolonizing scholarship. Early American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Winter 2015): 167-187

Book review of Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Cornell, 2014), for The New England Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Dec. 2014): 770-772

Book review of Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke, 2012), for The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (winter 2013)